I’m taking some quotes from a basketball story and an essay from my teacher, Adi Da. The Golden State Warriors are a basketball team that I enjoy watching because their style of passing and cooperation on the court is fun to watch.

“There’s a makeup in every player who’s ever played,” Kerr says, “that if you get to touch the ball and you get to be a part of the action — whether it’s as an assist man, ball mover, shooter, dribbler — the more people who are involved in the offense, the more powerful it becomes.”

Kerr had played four seasons (and won two titles) under Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and had admired how the Spurs’ passing helped foster a selfless, team-first culture.

“It wasn’t just play your best five guys to death,” Kerr says. “It was play everybody. You go deep into your rotation, even if it means losing a couple of games in the regular season, just empower everybody. It’s kind of the beauty of basketball, the old cliché about the total being greater than the sum of its parts — I believe in all of that.

Here’s a short essay from the booklet, Prior Unity, The Basis for A New Human Culture, by the World-Friend, Adi Da, page 61

The Urge to Participate

The fundamental urge in humankind-as-a-whole is to participate – not to be shut down, not to be thrown back on themselves, not to be treated merely as consumers who want this, that, and the other thing.

People want the opportunity of participation.

All over the world, the energy of participation is what should be tapped.

Instead of addressing everybody in terms of their problems, their “self”-interest, their consumer mentality, their egoity, address them as people who are patterns of energy wanting to participate.

A small group of programmers wants to change how people code—before catastrophe strikes. — from the Atlantic Magazine

Basic Premise: Code is getting too complicated–how to make it work better for humans?

Example: Problem with 911 calls going out due to simple counter bug

Software is “eating the world” but unexpected complications create havoc

Engineering is 1950s state of thinking: simple failures.

Problem with code is that the complexity is invisible.

Example of hackers remotely taking over a self-driving car.

John Resig, creator of javascript, tech lead at Khan Academy, wondered why learning programming is so tough. He watched a talk by Bret Victor in Montreal in 2012, (Inventing on Principle), about how programming is broken, and how to fix it.

Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.

Bret wants to work with images instead of abstract text.

Programming should be visual like WYSIWYG programs.

Example Pic:

Demo of WYSIWYG program: slider on right controls animation on left.

Airplane engineering has dealt with complexity by writing SCADE product family (for safety-critical application development environment)

Documentation is another area where what people want can differ from the code that gets created.

“Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.”

Programmers tend to be pragmatic and distrust the theoretical, ivory-tower stuff, which also works against programming improvements.

This article/ video interview is with Mike Novogratz, a veteran Wall Street trader who sees a lot of opportunity in the bitcoin ecosystem:

It started with a late-2015 visit to a friend’s startup in Brooklyn.

“I expected to see Joe, a dog and one assistant. Instead I saw 30 dynamic young people crammed in a Bushwick warehouse, coding, talking on the phone, making plans for this revolution,” Novogratz said. “Macro guys are instinctive. My instinct was, ‘I want to buy a chunk of this company.”’

The article mentions that he’s also starting up a $500 million hedge fund to invest in the crypto-space.

Not feeling so well today so I rested and watched an interview with John McAfee about the state of Cyber Security. John is an intelligent, outspoken character who started McAfee antivirus back in the 80s, then I remember him being in the news, on the run and being deported regarding his neighbor in Belize being murdered a few years ago. (He appears suspicious.) Now he’s peddling security software again, and crypto opportunities. I took some hopefully pertinent notes from the talk.

Interviewer: What’s the state of Cyber Security in 2017?

John M: We have none.

While you are watching your phone, your phone is watching you. This is just a fact of life.

The anti-virus paradigm is no longer functional, it doesn’t work. And I’m the person who invented it. Viruses aren’t the problem, hackers are. It’s a reactive paradigm, and that’s the problem. We have to become proactive. (He’s developing a product “Sentinel” to ID the hackers coming in.)

Smart phones are spy devices. Google: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. –Ridiculous.

Everybody exercises different degrees of privacy hundreds of times a day. We are humans, we live in an imperfect world.

On Cryptocurrency:

How secure is Bitcoin? I think it’s extremely secure. On the other hand, people put crypto wallets on their smartphones, and over half of smartphones are infected with key-logging software.

Pornography–the first thing the site does is download a rooting software. After the jailbreak, they download a keylogger. Only takes seconds, and from that point on, somebody is watching. People pay the porn sites to push keylogging software on to phones.

If you have an online wallet, an online account, the next day your money may disappear.

We all have secrets, yes? So why are we giving our data to companies?

Why do we use the cloud? It makes life easy, I can access my data from anywhere. The Cloud is OK for some types of things.

Bitcoin is a New Paradigm of Money

Whether bitcoin or Ethereum or Monero or whatever, you need to Educate yourself, it is easy to lose your money in Crypto

Offline wallet: trezor, seed keys display on the trezor, not on desktop. Don’t keep your wallet on any device.

Future security: Look 4 hacker, not the malware.

The world is on a dangerous cliff. We’re allowing these devices to master us, not the other way around.

At least a dozen big nation States have the power to bring down another nation’s power grid.